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As I do so often, I would like to talk about the possibility of extraterrestrial life within the Universe. I will take this last blog as an opportunity to reflect on the things which I have been able to learn from the course as a whole as it relates to one of the topics I am most interested in. Ultimately, I hate to make this conclusion, but I believe that extraterrestrial life is likley, but we will most likely never reach any meaningful contact with them. I believe that it is likely simply from the vast scale of the universe. It is said by many leading astronomers that there are “billions” of planets like Earth. There is no reason we should be one of the only ones to possibly harbor life. While Earth’s situation is highly unlikely as a planet, the almost mathematically, and in reality practically, infinite number of systems suggests there are at least a handful of places similar to Earth in their ability to harbor life.
While the possibilities for life are limitless, there are two main reasons I do not believe we will experience meaningful contact. First is the massive scale of the universe in general. The idea of physically transporting probes and even spaceships the distance to other stars, much less galaxies is a task that is seemingly impossible. Likely, if there was life somewhere out there, it wouldn’t have developed at the same time as our civilization. There would be a large portion that would have developed sooner, and these beings would have most likely discovered a way to communicate with us within their billions of years of development. So the second reason is the fact that we haven’t heard from anyone out there yet, because if they were truly out there, someone would’ve most likely figured it out.